Heroes Fall
by findinghero
Summary: Post Borderland Oneshot. How Tim learns what happened to Pedro Hernandez.


Disclaimer: Not mine and no money made here.

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Reconstructing files on the forensic lab's primary computers is not what McGee had planned to do on his Saturday night off. Okay, granted, it's not as though he had _specific_ plans for the evening, but he could have done without getting called into the forensic lab by one of the weekend techs to attend to a computer virus the man had accidentally uploaded to the main hard drive in the forensic lab.

Frankly, after John's frantic phone call and his desperate pleas not to allow Abby to kill him for sullying her lab with his lack of adherence to basic protocols, Tim's just relieved that the tech had enough sense to keep the lab's computer isolated, so that the computer bug isn't spread throughout the entire NCIS system. Tim's even more relieved when he gets to the Yard and judges the situation for himself.

_No big deal_, he decides as he checks out the damage. He contacts Vance about it, of course, but the director agrees with Tim that the problem isn't big enough to bother the guys in Cyber Crimes with it over the weekend since Tim is already there to take care of it. Even though that puts all the work squarely on Tim's shoulders, in a way, he's also kind of relieved because Abby can _seriously_ be tetchy about someone she doesn't know working on her hard drives, and, at the very least, Tim will be able to minimize the intrusive nature of his fixes.

McGee gets rid of the virus itself fairly quickly. He emails Vance for the second time that evening when he moves on to file recovery. He's pretty pleased with himself since it appears that he may even finish within a few hours, so he may not have to come back into the Yard tomorrow at all.

He settles in a little more deliberately where he sits on the stool in front of Abby's primary work station, smack in the middle of the lab. He doesn't feel the tightness settle into his muscles over the hours that he works—he's too far into the flow of it to feel those tiny aches. His body goes on vacation for a while as he uses the recovery program he wrote a few years ago, tweaking it even as it's recovering the corrupted files because a program can always perform more efficiently if it's modified to fit the system it's working on.

His mind and his fingers soar, and he loves it more than a little—the purity of it—even as the monotony of it numbs him a little by its tediousness. There's a small place inside of him that calms just a touch to be able to do what he does best and not worry about anything else. He'll be just as glad Monday, though, when he's able to get back to the bullpen and his real job.

The file catches his eye because it appears that someone once tried to pull a secure delete on it. It takes a lot to pull Tim out of the zone he's in, but the puzzle he's just found is just the sort of thing to do it. Whoever it was ran a program—McGee squints at the remnants of the file as he tries to recognize which one, maybe White Canyon?—managed the requisite sequence of delete-and-rewrite seven times—standard for military or CIA secure deletion. The only problem is, the user didn't completely isolate the source document before attempting the deletion, thus traces of the document survived in other areas of the hard drive.

Tim immediately begins applying the recovery program to pull the data of the deleted file along with the rest of the files he's trying to save, but his fingers pause before he executes the command. Although other lab techs use this computer, it's primarily Abby's computer. Additionally, chances are high, given the level of attention for the delete, that Abby herself was the one that deleted it. On the other hand, she left traces of the file behind (if it even _was_ her who wiped the file) and while that might have been a mistake, it also might have been intentional in case she ever required the mysterious document again.

McGee bites his lip, but then he pulls a flash drive from its home on his wristwatch, plugs it into his laptop, and redirects the recovery of the file in question to the portable drive. He _knows_ it's not a personal file, well, not if it's Abby's file anyway. She's almost as paranoid as he is about where she allows her personal electronic data to roam. So it has to be job related. He considers showing Abby the file and asking her to let him know if it's important but then winces at the very thought. If she really meant to delete it, then she'll be embarrassed and therefore furious at him for finding it. The two of them are having enough trouble in their personal relationship without him adding one more fly to the ointment.

A dialog box opens and closes, indicating the full recovery of the mystery file, possibly Abby's file, onto the flash drive. After he makes certain that the entire file's been pulled and its data is cohesive and complete, McGee pulls his thumb drive, and deletes all traces of the original copy on the hard drive. He doesn't want to cause a greater rift between him and Abby right now. He doesn't need another hole in his life where someone else he cared about walked away from him, and so McGee decides he'll check out the file later, at home. Since he's familiar with most of the cases she's worked in the last several years, McGee wagers that he should be able to determine fairly quickly if the partial delete was intentional or not. He decides he'll only go to her with the file if he can't tell for certain.

It's hours later before he makes it home. He winces as he removes his jacket and secures his weapon in the home safe in his bedroom. He rolls, first, his shoulders, and then his neck, but he knows the tension in both will follow him into tomorrow. He thinks about taking a shower but decides to check the mystery file first.

McGee boots up his computer and settles down in front of it, removing the tiny flash drive from his watch as he does. After plugging in the thumb drive, he isolates its files, just in case, and pulls up the curiosity from Abby's computer.

His brow furrows at the first page of the Word document. _The Murder of Pedro Hernandez_, McGee reads, _by Abigail Sciuto_. He leans back in his computer chair, and he reads.

**END**


End file.
